bag she dropped it: he picked it up and put it in the lock himself. She
led the way without comment up the darkened stairs, and on the landing
produced another key, opened the door of her rooms, fumbled for the
electric button, and suddenly the place was flooded with light. He
glanced in, and recoiled.



II

Oddly enough, the first thing he noticed in the confusion that reigned
was the absence of the piano. Two chairs were overturned, and one of
them was broken; a siphon of vichy lay on the floor beside a crushed
glass and two or three of the cheap ornaments that had been swept off
the mantel and broken on the gaudy tiles of the hearth. He glanced at
the woman, who had ceased crying, and stood surveying the wreckage with
the calmness, the philosophic nonchalance of a class that comes to look
upon misfortune as inevitable.

"They didn't do a thing to this place, did they?" was her comment.
"There was two guys in here to-night who got a notion they were funny."

Hodder had thought to have fathomed all the horrors of her existence, but
it was not until he looked into this room that the bottomless depths of
it were brought home to him. Could it be possible that the civilization
in which he lived left any human being so defenceless as to be at the
mercy of the ghouls who had been here? The very stale odours of the
spilled whiskey seemed the material expression of the essence of degraded
souls; for a moment it overpowered him. Then came the imperative need of
action, and he began to right one of the chairs. She darted forward.